PARKED.COM - Official Thread!

[ZOX]

Hi,

Welcome to the OFFICIAL PARKED.COM thread!

 

[netmeg]

Can you use parked to park a name with no type in traffic and expect to receive visitors, or is parked a poor choice for these type of names. Is parked only for names with existing traffic and type in traffic.

I ask this, for the simple fact that I had a name in parked and had no traffic. I moved it over to Bodis and within 3 weeks with a custom page, was receiving about 75-100 visitors a day, with a 14% click thru rate.

If anyone knows the answer, I would appreciate even a brief reply.

Thanks

If you optimize it, and it gets picked up by the search engines, you will get traffic - eventually. But it will probably take at least a month. You say you started receiving traffic within 3 weeks after moving it to Bodis - since both Parked and Bodis give you extensive optimization capability, I suspect that you would have probably started to see traffic eventually had you left it Parked. Just a question of when Google moseys along to pick it up.

 

[StrictlyNames]

looks like it's happening now. click on portfolio, then "yesterday" from dropdown box. Will have overall update. Just not individual updates yet.

 

[Donny]

IB - The most important thing when modifying your Domain Title is to hit the save button, that looks nothing like a save button. I just modified it for you.

Donny

 

[Donny]

Sorry guys/gals I was a little tied up today or I would have responded earlier. In a nutshell, Yahoo implemented some new code last Wednesday and this new code affected all platforms including the all Yahoo based parking companies and even Yahoo.com itself. The code was rolled back sometime on Thursay so the normal numbers started coming back a little on Thursday's final numbers, but all of Friday's numbers should be back to normal.

What actually happened? If you had very specific domains that targeted keywords that weren't generic keywords you were affected by this problem. Yahoo has 2 types of results that they return, the first is called exact match, which is when somebody types in "windows server hosting" and an advertiser had bid on "windows server hosting", this is where most make the most money. The other type is broad match, which is when somebody searches for "what was the score of Alabama vs LSU in football" and since there probably isn't an exact match for this, Yahoo uses all of the words to create a search. This is the basically the same system that Yahoo uses with YPN. Because this is a broad match, the prices are lower than exact match.

The problem that was introduced last week put the broad match above the exact match. What this this is that the advertisers paid less, we received less, and our partners received less. This didn't affect everybody, just some of our partners.

But that's about all I know.

Our estimates on daily basis should be a little low for the next few days as it relearns the prices for different keywords.

Donny

 

[Varon]

I wish... :hehe:

I agree with Varon. Donny definitely deserves rep points. Although he's just representing "his company", he has answers to almost all our questions and does the one thing that's near priceless - Deliver outstanding customer service that turns into a very welcoming and positive user experience.

IB

Yeah...I've noticed that if you added rep points to a member previously, you keep getting that system message, if you try adding reps to that same member again.

I was able to add reps and also an offer of a Dom Pérignon for Donny anytime he is in the VA/DC area.

 

[Donny]

netmeg - Can you give me step by step on what you are doing and it's not working? The only way that I know of us resetting it back to the default template is if you hit the reset button. So can you give me a step by step when you have a minute.

Thanks!

nettidings - Alternative Traffic Destination (ATD) was originally created when we only had 1 provider. If you wanted us to send your traffic somewhere else when we couldn't monetize your traffic you could put in a URL and we would send the traffic to Domain Sponsor, Namedrive, or whoever else you wanted us to send it to. Once we got a secondary provider it's not as useful as it was before but some people still would rather use their own secondary provider instead of the one we use. The ATD can also be used if our Primary and Secondary provider do not want the domain or they don't have any results for the keyword somebody searched for.

Personally, I recommend setting it, but keeping it at primary and secondary. But only about .1% of the does something not return for both of our providers for a keyword.

Donny

 

[netmeg]

netmeg - Can you give me step by step on what you are doing and it's not working? The only way that I know of us resetting it back to the default template is if you hit the reset button. So can you give me a step by step when you have a minute.

Okey doke - here is step by step.

First of all, I'm using IE7 on Vista Home.

I log in to my account, select Portfolios, and go into the particular Portfolio in which I have the domains I want to edit. I select a domain, and click on edit (generally I open this in a separate window)

Say my domain is using the template Bill Payment, and I want to change it to Bankruptcy. I select Bankruptcy from the drop down box, and the Bankruptcy template appears on my screen. I then click on the Save Changes button, the page reloads, there appears in red at the top of the page "Successfully updated domain", but the template is set BACK to Bill Payment, not the Bankruptcy template I chose and thought I saved. If I actually type in the domain to look at it, it still displays Bill Payment.

Now. If I repeat the above steps up to the point where the new template first appears on my screen (Bankruptcy, in this case) and INSTEAD of clicking on Save Changes, I click on Customize Template, and then, WITHOUT ANY FURTHER CUSTOMIZATIONS, directly click on the SAVE CUSTOMIZATIONS button, the window again refreshes, and I get a message that says Done: Customizations Complete! I click on the link to close the window; at this point my changes actually are saved, and the domain is now running the Bankruptcy template.

I hope that's enough detail to help recreate it.

UPDATE: I just tried to change a template in Firefox 2.0.0.9, and it works perfectly. Normally I use Firefox, but I have to do a lot of copy and pasting at the moment, and Firefox doesn't like to give you access to the clipboard without modifying the internals, and this is a new laptop, I haven't done that yet. So I was using IE7. So in short, I can re-create the problem every time in IE7, but it works just as it's supposed to in Firefox 2. Haven't tried Safari on my Mac yet, but I will, and will also try on a Windows XP laptop, just to see.

 

[Varon]

Donny, you're worth 3 times whatever Parked is paying you.

From what I know, he is a part owner of parked.

 

[evilopinions]

Can someone shed some more light on this quality score. Is it calculated by each individual domain or by your entire profile of domains and then you are just given a "blanket quality" score? If this is the case, I need to move about 800-1000 domains away from parked because I simply don't have the time to optimize them and I have a feeling they could be hurting my quality score. My CTR is at about 10% right now for my entire portfolio, but of the 1500 domains I have at parked only about 30-40 actually have added content. Should I just take down all my domains without content in hopes that my CTR will go up and park them somewhere else in the meantime until i have time to optimize them and add content?

Ok here is a tip for you..

Other people may have other ways. But personally I recommend creating 1 site that lists all of your domains and a little description about them. Submit that one page, let Google hit all of them and viola. I've seen it work millions of times.

I tried it one time with about 300,000 domains and it worked. Did I mention I didn't even own the domains?

I'm sure other people have other ways of doing similiar things.

Donny

My example though it works in theory trader has a very good point. At some time you will find that all of the domains are in one place. Sure you could create your own dmoz style search engine and try to hide it. Or do like I saw last week with somebody who downloaded wikipedia and just randomly inserted his own domains in. But I always like starting small.

Donny

And about the TQ score is are some extracts from a discussion on the internet...

Mind you i did not wanted to post an outgoing link to DNF so am quoting here...Also I do not have an accoun there so couldn't point u there...

Last night Yahoo, our primary search provider, announced to all of their advertisers and partners that they would be implementing a "quality based pricing" system starting immediately in the United States and Canada.

"...quality-based pricing is designed to adjust advertiser pricing based on the quality of traffic coming from our distribution network. Traffic is intended to be priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality delivered to advertisers, based on conversion rates and other proprietary factors.

To assist you in better understanding the level of your traffic quality, we plan to provide you with a Traffic Quality (TQ) score for each of your implementations. TQ scores should be included in your partner reports and communicated as a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating.

By pricing traffic commensurate with quality, we believe that we will deliver higher value to our advertisers, thus strengthening our marketplace and driving up monetization for our partners."

This is how the "quality based pricing" system will work at Parked.com. A person comes to one of your domains parked with us, they search and click out to an advertiser, Yahoo will look to see what your traffic quality score is and let's say you are an 8. The advertiser will be charged whatever an 8 is worth, if the click was originally $1.00, I was told that the click would be at least $0.80 but it could be much higher.

We will provide you with your traffic quality score once we receive it today, the TQ scores are supposed to be updated every 2 weeks. Over the next few weeks as we learn how the TQ scores are calculated we should be able to provide a little better guidance on how to increase your scores. If you feel that your score is too low, we should be able to work with you to see how we can improve your score.

Over the next 10 days Yahoo will continue to make improvements to the new system. We do not have any news on when any other countries will be added to the quality based pricing system. One last thing is that this will affect all parking companies that are using Yahoo, not just Parked.com.

Please don't hesitate to contact your account manager Monte White at [email protected] if you have any questions.


Thanks for your time,

Donny Simonton
CTO, Parked.com

So far from what I have seen, it's not whether it's a typo or if it's a correct spelled domain, it's all about the volume and does the traffic convert in the end.

I wouldn't pull any domains right now, because it's pretty amazing in some cases what has a high score and what doesn't.

Donny

The advertisers will not know what the TQ score is of the traffic they are receiving.

Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
1) If we have domains with no/low traffic in our account, will that affect our TQ score? If yes, then the obvious choice would be to move them.

Removing domains with no or low traffic should not affect your overall score. It's all about clicks, not revenue, not searches, not hits, completely about clicks. They take all clicks from your account and based on that data determine a score. You have a have a minimum number of clicks to get a score, if you don't you get a N/A. Remember we are also only talking about US/CA traffic right now as well.


Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
2) If we have domains with low CTR in our account, will that affect our TQ score? If yes, then the obvious choice is to move them.

Low CTR shouldn't affect your score at all, potentially it might increase your score, because people will be finding exactly what they are looking for.



Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
3) Over what time frame are we being assessed? 1/3/6/12 months?

In the past when Yahoo had TQ scores it was over a 1 month period and they calculated them every 2 weeks. This was good and bad, if you had a low score and we made improvements it took almost a month to see if our changes worked. I have been told the new calculations are done every 2 weeks and it's for the last 2 weeks, I was told no historical information is being used. So this is good and bad. The good is that if you had a low score 2 weeks ago you could potentially move it from a 1 to a 10. The bad is if you are a 10 you could drop down to a 1 under certain circumstances.



Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
4) Is the TQ a rolling score? If not how often is it looked at and updated? Another way to ask this is, if we make changes to improve our TQ score, how long will it be before we see the results of those changes.

2 weeks is what I have been told. On Friday, I asked when would the next update happen and they were not sure. So I would assume the next update would be next Saturday or Sunday.


Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
5) The scale is 1-10, right? So what percentage of a 10 score do 1-9 users get?

No clue right now. Personally, I haven't really see a large change in customers revenue based on score. I personally originally expected if you had a 1 then the advertiser would only have to pay 10%. But so far it looks like the advertiser gets a 10% discount and still has 90%. Now of course that could change, but Yahoo has not given me any indictation of if a 5 will be a 50% discount or a 5% discount. And I usually ask everyday.



Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
6) What other factors are being considered when calculating an account's score?

The biggest one is conversion, which is very similiar to how Google does theirs. Now Google also includes search queries as well, as Yahoo doesn't. Over the past week we have been taking certain people with lower scores and working with them to see how we can improve their scores.


I hope this answers all of your questions.

Donny

Normally they do rate us by the combination of all scores. But in the end they don't give me 1 score that says we are an 8 or a 7.

I can tell you that we have 3 large porfolios of domains that we own ourselves and their scores are 10, 8, and 8.

I don't think Yahoo will ever publish a list of what scores parking companies have, they won't even tell me if I'm the 3rd largest parking company with them or the 50th largest.

Donny

Stu - You have it a little wrong. Let's say your account gets 100 clicks a day, you will probably have a TQ score with Yahoo. I don't know the exact number but 100 is easier to use. The scores are not calculated on a domain level only on an account level. So if you have 10 domains in your account and they get 10 clicks each per day then you will probably have a TQ score. The score has nothing to do with volume, it's all about conversions. As I mentioned before we have one account that is a 10 and it has 3 times the click volume of an account we have that has an 8. I've seen people who were making over $3,000 a day with a 1 and people 2 domains in their account that were a 10.

Overall we haven't gone down since the 7th, but as I was originally told it would take 2-3 weeks for Yahoo to finish implementing all of the initial changes.

Donny

Back to my example, if you have 10 domains in your account, and the minimum threshold to get a TQ score is 100 clicks per day, and 1 domain gets 91 clicks per day and the other nine get 1 click per day, I don't see how those are hurting your score. Basically they take all 100 clicks and give you a score based on all 100 combined. If you have 1 domain getting 100 clicks per day or 5,000 domains getting a total off 100,000 clicks a day, you get one score which is on an account level not a domain level.

Focus - Javascript. The advertisers are supposed to put it on their join/invoice/signup page and it sends a hit back to Yahoo telling them they got a sale. Not all advertisers use it so it's only counted when an advertiser does use it.

Donny

Also what da big daddy thinks about it...
http://frankschilling.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/06/yahoo_to_begin_.html

I checked your contents.
You have many link to wikipedia.
You will lose visitors every time those visitors click on those links.
Why don't you make those links open in new window?

For example...

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Perkins_Loan" title="Federal Perkins Loan">

Change that to...

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Perkins_Loan" title="Federal Perkins Loan" target="_blank">

Just add target="_blank" within <code>

Course I will change it...Thanks for that...Just saw was a 1 click lander yesterday thats why took pains to go to wiki and take some content...he he...

Me too lazy .. :imho:

 

[hitchhiker]

Google calculates the "size" of the ad areas (and whether its above the fold) as part of their quality score. A custom developed domain with smaller ad area will be ranked much here than a parked domain regardless what you do.

No, I was expecting that it would restore the only domain I've tried it for to page 1 of the Google results for the domain's phrase, but can't find one speck of improvement at all. Originally, before moving the domain to Parked that is, I had a simple web page up with some text and Yahoo ads scattered up and down, and a few CJ ads at the bottom (mostly graphical). After moving it to Parked, starting with the framing method, the domain had some days over $50 and seemed to be moving in the direction of eventually reaching $xxx per day. Then one day it disappeared from Google completely for about a week or so. Then it reappeared back on Page 1 for a while. Then it was soon blown off the Google pages again like dust in the wind and has been that way ever since. Needless to say, the income level went into the tank, too. All this has taken place since around May/June.

The thing that's so ironic about this, aside from the fact that the domain is the very .com of the search phrase itself that I'm alluding to, is that the content I added to the Parked.com page is much better than what I was originally publishing that had been on page 1 of Google. Now you can forget about any page - 2.3,4,5 - whatever. Also, although I have not exactly counted the number of words to compare the two, my best estimate is that the content I added to the Parked.com is also more extensive (could easily look at a back up of the old page to compare if needed). The bottom line is that the Parked.com page now should really be doing much better than the original page I was publishing before.

Additionally, I just opened an Adwords account to try the arbitrage route for this domain after reading on the boards that it was allowed with Parked.com if you used Google or Microsoft only, and it's been nearly a total waste really. The abrupt deactivation of the keywords and appearance of the $5.00 and $10.00 minimum bids has been so extreme and such a rollercoaster that, as if the first matter above didn't make it fairly obvious, it really seems like a big penalty has been clamped on this domain with no end in sight. I have to admit, I now feel very little or no incentive at all to continue spending any time on the content feature (sorry, Donny) because I feel like I would just be wasting my time. Otherwise of course, I really do like Parked and the new features that appeared in the interface are certainly great.

 

[netmeg]

With reference to your Gomer Pyle domain, it looks like Google just hasn't picked up the page title yet - once it does, you could well see better placement. Also, I'd maybe edit the ad categories to make sure you don't have anything in there that isn't relevant to classic television shows or Gomer Pyle or whatever it is you're going for. Oh - and you don't want to repeat the same string in the meta description tag that you have in the title, so take out the duplicate mention of ultimate resource - just have it say "Get Gomer Pyle DVDs, show history, television listings, and much more!"

 

[hitchhiker]

are you using content from wikipedia. . . is so google will send you to the "supplementary" results despite being indexed. . . .

try to have original content, it will rank higher

meta tag descriptions are never shown in the search results . . .too much spamming.

Just got my parked page indexed and search results page are strange?

<begin Google results>
Puts - Write Puts and Sell Puts Like The Pros.... option holder is merely selling his short position, and is not contractually obligated by the sold option.) Wikipedia. ©2007 puts.tv All rights reserved.
<end Google results>

Any ideas why the Meta description tag was not indexed but instead the LAST few lines of my custom content?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[netmeg]

I'll save Donny the trouble of answering that; I just did a test: I did a lookup on Google for one of my alternative health domains with a phrase that appears in the content, and it came up as #7. See graphic below; you'll also note that in this case, some of the relevant content also shows in the snippet. Normally, Google would show my meta description tag as the snippet, however, if the search is coming up as a result for a specific string in the content (in this case, "ayurveda") then it replaces the snippet with the text from the content. So you see that snippets are dynamic, not static, and depend on the search they come up for.

Sample Google SERP

 

[Donny]

.mobi is on our list to add, we were close to launching it then we decided to move those resources to something else for the time being. It will be available at some time, but it's not a high priority as there really isn't much money it .mobi domains except for the speculation.

Whitebark - Yes we do have something up our sleeve that should be available sometime in January, hopefully. Maybe. I haven't forgotten about your other requests, it's just been a busy last few days.

Just an update on one of the things we have been working on recently. Yesterday we added another 10 webservers to speed a few things on the surfers side, these are the first dual proc quad core webservers that we have added into the system. We have moved about 20% of the normal traffic to these machines and they seem to be doing quite well. Over the next week or so we may move additional traffic to these new servers. No downtime was involved with this addition.

We have 2 new DB boxes that we will be adding in to the mix in a few weeks, but this will involve some downtime on Parked.com but your domains will work fine during this time. I will make an annoucement with a date and a timeframe for us to add these new servers in.

Oh well, back to work.

Donny

 

[Donny]

hpersson - Yahoo probably won't respond to you even if you find an email, just send the domain to your account manager and they can submit the domain to Yahoo for review.

Donny

 

[advaita]

Looks like it's back to normal - and fortunately for me my changes seem to have been saved and not lost

 

[John Doe]

Most of my domains at at parkingpanel but a lot of people in the L-L-L thread are talking up parked so I signed up to try them out. One question, is there a "for sale-please inquire" link you can put on your parked domain? If so is there a bulk modify for this or do you have do do each one? I looked at their FAQ's but didnt see it.

thanks, Gary.

You can set up your default for sale message within account information, additionally you can change message for each domain separately using edit options at portfolio manager.

 

[netmeg]

Some. Depends on the state - I have all 50, and some are ranking better than others.

 

[John Doe]

Try changing the key words via the "edit keyword" link near the upper left of the domain detail page (not the meta tag key words). I found this can make a huge change in the content on your page - maybe take out the word adult. Every time you do this it resets the template to the version that the system thinks is best for your content - kind of a PIA. So, get the content right first, then set your template choice.

Content is mostly determined by master keyword under your domain title. Change it and you are done.

can I add name for adults or similar o parked (nothing too spicy actually like hot frills...)

Parked accepts adult domains.

 

[copper]

I'm slowing moving my domains over to parked. So I want to improve my performance with a few of them and add some custom content.

I select edit domain and I'm on the page with the keywords, templates etc.

On the bottom left it says custom content (below title tag) but I can't click on anything to add the content.

Am I missing one simple step???

Thanks
db

Look to your right of "custom content".
You'll see square icon.
Just click that

 

[whitebark]

Can I add Google Analytics to a Parked page? The custom content editor eats up the JavaScript code.

A way around this is if you have your own server and access to the stats:
use your own 1x1 transparent gif and track visitors from that. No javascript needed!

 

[netmeg]

None of the major search engines use the meta keyword anymore.

 

[GILSAN]

Thanks Gilsan.
In the second question I am referring to the two places where you put keywords. There is one place on the left-hand side towards the top of the customization page where you can click on 'edit keyword' to change the keywords. There is the other place on the right-hand side, as referred to in the word, word, word, question. So, should I put as many keywords as possible in these different places, or put one or two keywords in the left-hand 'keyword' area and a whole long list of keywords in the right-hand 'Meta Tag' area? I hope this is a bit clearer.

On top you should put a keyword that relates to your Domain Name. For example:

If your domain is DebtManagement dot something then you should use the keyword Debt Management

The META TAGS keywords (at the bottom right) do as Netmeg says; Just leave it blank

It would be advisable to put a META TAGS Description as well as a TITLE TAG

GIL

 

[whitebark]

My parked.com portfolio ctr for the pay period - 60.42%. Some domains have over 100% ctr.

Keep working at the keywords. If it isn't working - change it! Watch the referrer information - especially those coming from the search engines, as they leave a clue as to what they are looking for. I've also noticed the ctr increase on some just by changing the images on the template.

 

[Donny]

I hadn't heard that one yet. Thanks for the news.

Donny